Comedy Advice (part 1)

Everyone once in a while, I talk to people who are interested in writing comedy. They have funny ideas, but don't know where to start. (And I can tell you from experience, trying to eat the heart of a clown is not the most efficient way to get better at comedy...despite the shoes those guys are really, really fast.) Since clown cannibalism is pretty much out of the question, we have to realize that there is no one, easy way to learn how to be funny. So here's my advice on how to work on improving your comedy skills.

First, you need to find funny people and spend time with them. Humor is one thing that can be absorbed through osmosis, sort of. One of the best ways I got better at being funny and writing comedy is spending time with people smarter and wittier than me. It forced me to keep up, to train my brain to have an ear for comedy. It took a while to get the hang of it, but eventually I was able to make people laugh with a casual comment, and that's helped my writing.

This Relationship Corner: Work has no Gender

If you were alive in the 1980's, you couldn't escape The Cosby Show. It was the biggest sitcom on television, providing the template for many, many 80's sitcoms about the perils of raising a family in middle (or upper-middle) class America. One part of the show that always stuck with me was the character of Elvin, Sondra's chauvinistic boyfriend who absolutely believed that there was "man's work" and "women's work." The women of the Huxtable house, Claire in particular, took umbrage with that.

The Cosby Show was not just about breaking down the racial divide, showing an affluent African American family with two professional parents: a doctor and a lawyer. The show also made great strides on breaking down the gender barrier, refusing to buy into the idea that men, and especially women, had "their place." Elvin's beliefs that there was such a thing as "women's work" was quickly slapped down by every female in the Huxtable household. He was also given a counter-example in the form of Cliff Huxtable.

Cliff was an active member of his domestic partnership. He never divided the household duties into His and Hers. He simply did what needed to be done. As an impressionable 80's viewer, I never forgot the sight of Cliff in the kitchen, or watching the kids, or doing whatever was needed for his family. Cliff knew a very important truth, one I share with you today: work is work, it has no gender.

This Relationship Corner: Chores

Ever have one of those "there ought to be a law!" kind of moments, when you get an idea so good you think it should be mandatory for everyone. I had one a while back and I had to share. A couple shouldn't be able to get married until they've spent an afternoon running errands together. I told you it was a good idea, and even if it won't be a law, I think it should be a vital part of pre-marital counseling.

If you've never heard of pre-marital counseling, it's when a couple attends counseling sessions to make sure that they know what they are getting into with marriage. It's the plot of the movie License to Wed. (And if you've never heard of that movie, then this is one of those times when ignorance truly is bliss.) The goal is preventative maintenance, addressing potential problems before you get married so they don't crop up after. It's a great idea, really, and I recommend it to everyone thinking about marriage.

This Relationship Corner: I didn't mean it like that

Ever have one of those arguments? It didn't start out like an argument. It was just an ordinary conversation with your significant other. So ordinary that you were really on autopilot, tuning in now and then to check up on it. Suddenly, without really paying attention, something slips out of your mouth that you either didn't mean, or you didn't mean it like that. Had you been paying more attention, you might have caught it and you never would have said it. But you did say it, and now you're in trouble.

There's two ways to go when this happens, when you didn't mean to say something hurtful but the other person got hurt anyway. The first strategy is to stand by your words. After all, you didn't mean it. It's them who has the problem. They should get over it and let it go. Why are they making such a big deal about it anyway? You're just going to wait patiently until they get over it.

Let's call that the wrong choice.

This Relationship Corner: Short and Long Term Attraction

We usually can't help who we're attracted to. The instant we lay eyes on someone we know whether we find that person attractive. It could be for a variety of different reasons, but before we take our next blink we know if we're attracted. It may not make any sense to us, or anyone else, or it could be the most obvious thing in the world. We've all found ourselves hopelessly attracted.

Attraction is tricky, but it isn't as big a mystery as we might think. True, sometimes there's no accounting for taste, but many times, it tracks. We 'fall' for very specific reasons, and if we look inside ourselves, we can figure out just who is our type, and why. We might also want to figure out whether we want to act on our attraction, as it could be leading us in a very bad direction. Other times, our attraction is telling us something our conscious mind hasn't quite figured out - this person could be a great match for us.

This Relationship Corner: Testing Your Relationship

There comes a time in most relationships when you put on a white lab coat, grab a clip board, and force the one you love to run through a maze. I'm being metaphorical (I hope) about the ways we test the relationship and each other. As we seek to find out whether this person is someone we see ourselves with long-term, we run various tests, just as our partner is testing us. And that's the way it's supposed to be.

The reason we test is simple. It's how we discover things. Just ask the Mythbusters. They test a myth to see whether it's true, false, or plausible, and no matter how it turns out, they know more about it coming out of the test than they did going in. Then they blow something up, which is why science is awesome. In our case, these tests help us discover what we want out of a relationship and whether this other person can give it to us.

But before you go racing to find the latest Cosmo quiz, let me assure you that I'm not talking about those tests, but ones that are actually useful. I'm also not taking about being sneaky and underhanded, trying to manipulate your partner into doing what you want. The goal is to see who your significant other truly is and whether the two of you are compatible long-term.

I'd like to profile three of the tests that we run in our relationships and why they are essential to your long-term health. After all, if you can weed out the riff-raff early, it will save you weeks, months, even years of time, time better spent looking for the right person.

This Relationship Corner: Talking About the Ex

Nothing can take a perfectly pleasant date from zero to uncomfortable silence quite like bringing up an ex. If you want to completely kill the mood, and perhaps your chances of ever going out again, talk nonstop about your ex. To make sure you destroy any hope of another date, ask about all your date's exes and demand details.

And yet, talking about your exes is necessary for a healthy relationship. The key, of course, if how you talk about them. This might not be something you bring up on a first date, or when you're just starting to get to know each other. This is one of those more serious conversations you have a little bit later, when you've built up some trust, started to establish a bond, and can handle bringing up potentially rough subjects.

This Relationship Corner: Sharing Interests

Here's an important little tip for a thriving long-term relationship or marriage. It helps, a lot, if the two of you share some common interests. While you don't have to do everything together, your passions should intersect somewhere. You two are building a life together, and it's much easier to build if you two are operating with a similar set of blueprints. For example, if both of you love making blueprints.

I mentioned last week that a strong couple culture can help build an enduring relationship. Part of building this culture is sharing activities that give you mutual experiences. Events that happened when you two went snorkeling or skydiving together will help you build your couple shorthand and speak in your couple code that no one else can understand. When you lack mutual experiences, you don't get that chance to create as much of your shared code.

This Relationship Corner: Couple Culture

If you hang around a couple long enough you'll start to pick up on certain habits and quirks they possess. They'll have cute nicknames for each other, they might whisper something and laugh for no apparent reason, or they've got an elaborate ritual between the two of them that would leave a team of anthropologists scratching their heads. As a couple bonds, the two create their own couple culture, and it's more than just an annoying side effect all their single friends have to put up with. It's essential for that couple's survival.

Couple culture is one of those things that only makes sense when you're in a couple. On the outside, it's hard to make sense of the hows and whys of what a couple is doing. Once you become a part of a couple, though, you'll understand and appreciate it as you, too, start to develop these rituals and habits. Today I'll try to explain what it is, why it's happening, and why it matters.

This Relationship Corner: What Makes a Good Wedding

Another Valentine's Day has come and gone, and for many couples that means one thing: they've transitioned from a normal dating couple to that annoying engaged couple who won't shut up about the wedding. Yes, every single pair of you are annoying. I should know, I was once part of that proud, obnoxious tradition.

I understand why you can't shut up about it. This is going to be the biggest day of your life, a day that forever defines you, a day that will begin a lifelong journey with your partner, your spouse, your better half. The one person Spousal Privilege says can't testify against you. This will be a day you and everyone else will remember for the rest of your lives. It's kind of a big deal.

You may recall that the last time I wrote about weddings I seemed to dismiss them. Given that the article was titled "The Wedding Isn't Important" and I referred to the wedding as "the least important day in your marriage," you might assume that I'm anti-wedding. I'm not. True, I stand by every word I wrote (even the typos) because it wasn't anti-wedding. It was against wrong priorities with the wedding, putting all your effort into that one day and not realizing that you need to but that much effort and more into planning all the days after. It was against poor priorities.

This Relationship Corner: Why you need Romance

Men, today's article is mainly aimed at you. I feel the need to let you know that Valentine's Day is fast approaching. You have a little less than two weeks to get it together and act like you had it figured out all along. There's still time to get her (or him) something special and make it a memorable day. Don't say I never look out for you.

Now, I can hear some of you responding already. "It's just a made-up holiday" is probably the main crux of your argument. And I concede that Valentines Day as it is now is pretty made up, no doubt influenced by the dastardly union of Hollywood and Hallmark. This knowledge, you argue, gets you out of having to made a big to-do over Valentine's Day. For that, I have this answer:

No it doesn't. Celebrate it anyway.

This Relationship Corner: The Best Kind of Opposite

Everyone's no doubt heard it: opposites attract. That's true to a certain extent. We are fascinated by people opposite us in lifestyle and personality. It's that exotic other, the greener grass, the road not taken that intrigues us. There's a poetry to it all, being so completely different that the only thing holding us together is our love. It's exciting and keeps things interesting. It's also not likely to last long.

Let me add an addendum: opposites attract but rarely sustain. If they're just looking for a short-term relationship, then being with an opposite can make it a time to remember. However, when two opposites start thinking about the long-term, the most likely result is that their relationship ends. True, it is possible for two people who are completely opposite to forge a relationship and work through all their differences, but it's an incredibly hard, uphill battle and not everyone is ready for it.

This Relationship Corner: Debug Yourself

Microsoft launched Windows Vista with great fanfare. Based on the general reviews, it was too much fanfare. Users complained that the new operating system had issues, from taking too much memory to general compatibility issues with all their old programs. What was supposed to be revolutionary turned into a big mess.

Microsoft responded by releasing patch after patch for Vista. They didn't change Vista into another operating system all together, but rather they worked to make Vista the best version of itself possible. It wasn't Windows XP. It wasn't Windows 7. It was still Vista, but a version of Vista that people actually wanted.

What if Microsoft hadn't responded so well. What if their response was "Vista isn't going to change and you all need to accept it for what it is." What if they decided to stick with Vista forever and never update or improve again? That would be a terrible example of customer service. You'd see a lot of people defect from using any Microsoft product, opting for a company open to improving their product for the best experience possible.

Yet when it comes to problems in our relationships, we often have the "I'm not going to change and you have to live with it" attitude, and just as it wouldn't work for a major company, it doesn't work for us. Like Vista, we've all got our share of glitches and bugs, and if we want our relationships to have the best user experience, we need to learn how to debug ourselves.

This Relationship Corner: A History of Bad Relationships

I'm a big believer that your first bad relationship should be considered a mulligan. It shouldn't be held against you, because we're all entitled to a relationship mistake. When we're starting out in life, we don't have a lot of direct experience that tells us whether this friend, girlfriend, boyfriend, is actually a horrible person who we need to keep the hell away from. Sometimes we don't even realize that we're in a bad relationship until we get out of it, or when we catch a glimpse of someone else's good relationship and see what we're missing. It can be an eye-opening experience and might make us more cautious or wary about future relationships.

That's why this first bad relationship shouldn't be held against us. We had no idea what was going on. However, when we have a second, third, or a long string of bad relationships, that's another matter entirely. Then, I hate to say it, we don't get off the hook so easily. We bear a lot of responsibility for these bad relationships for one simple reason: we are the common denominator in all our bad relationships.

Today, I'm going to address this history of bad relationships. We're going to explore what we need to understand about what's going on and how we can right the course of our relationship history.

This Relationship Corner: Where to Spend the Holidays

The Holiday season is now upon us, and whether you're celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, Boxing Day, New Years Eve, or any of the multitude of holidays in December, you and your significant other will have one huge issue: where do you go to spend the holidays?

Remember, when you enter into a relationship, it's with more than one person. Both of you also get each other's families. Most of the year, visiting your families isn't a terribly stressful proposition. You go when you can, and if you are busy or live far away, they usually understand if you can't visit that often. However, when the Holidays roll around, visiting family is another issue entirely. You may expect to visit your family, as usual, and simply bring this new person along. But what happens when your partner has the same idea about his/her family?

This Relationship Corner: Don't be a Martyr

The great thing about being in a relationship is that you have an extra set of hands. While it would be really cool if those hands were attached to you Doctor Octopus style, allowing you to both drive and eat your sandwich at the same time, you have to settle for the second-best option: hands attached to someone you love. These aren't just any hands, they are helping hands, and when you need a favor, big or small, they are the hands you call first.

This perk isn't just one-way, though. Your partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, Imzadi, might also need a favor, and you will be the first responder. It will be your job to help reach things on a shelf, pick up something while you are out, help clean a mess, bring them something they forgot, or one of a thousand other small favors. While you won't be able to fulfill every one of these requests, because no one is that good, you'll do your share. And when you do, I have one suggestion to ensure a healthy relationship: don't whine about it.

This Relationship Corner: "Will You Marry Me?"

Proposals are more an art than a science, but that doesn't mean that a little science wouldn't hurt. While there's no one way to propose, a successful proposal has several common factors that I want to address. There are also plenty of common factors present in unsuccessful proposals. It is my hope that today's installment will help your proposal be a memorable story you tell your grandchildren, and not an embarrassing Youtube video that will haunt you forever.

Let's start with the most important factor in a proposal. If you don't know 100%, that the answer is "yes," then don't propose. I realize that this isn't the most romantic advice, but I have news for you. We're talking about marriage, a lifelong commitment that requires a lot of work and sacrifice. Maintaining a successful marriage isn't easy, and if you don't have the right partner by your side, you're already starting with a huge handicap. Part of having the right partner is the both of you being on the same page, and that includes the both of you having the same opinion on marriage. If only one of you is going to be committed to your marriage, then that's a problem.

This Relationship Corner: Road Trips

As we begin to date our significant other, we look for clues and signs about the direction of our relationship. Is this just a short-term fling? Or is this the beginning of something long-term? We become little scientists, putting on mental and emotional lab coats and getting out clipboards and running the numbers. Testing is an important part of the relationship process, and I'll talk more about it in a later installment.

Today's topic concerns one test that I believe you must run before committing to this other person for the rest of your life: the road trip.

This Relationship Corner: Birthdays

My wife and I have a tradition for her birthday. We have a lot of recipe books lying around, including the three volume set of tomes from Alton Brown. Every year, she gets to pick several recipes from one of those books for a fantastic meal, and I make it for her. It's something she always looks forward to because I'm not too shabby in the kitchen, and when paired with these advanced recipes, I produce some of my best output.

This leads me to today's topic: birthdays. Birthdays are important for a lot of us, and if they're important to your significant other, then they better be important to you. You better make a big deal about it, and above all else, you better remember when it is. In this digital age, there is no reason why someone's birthday should sneak up on you. If you can't remember it, you know there's an app for that. To forget a birthday is an act of willful ignorance. (Or a sign of severe head trauma, but men, if you're going to use that excuse, get a doctor's note.)

This Relationship Corner: Territory

Did you ever have to share a room growing up? Perhaps you shared a dorm room in college. Or you were forced to share a backseat with one or more siblings on a long family road trip. (Even worse, you had to share it back when cars didn't come equipped with DVD players...the horror!) If you've ever had to share space with another person, you've dealt with the issue of territory. You also know how it feels when someone violates your territory, and that feeling is the opposite of a pleasant surprise.

Let's go back to that shared room. The Interpersonal Communication Book (11th edition) by Joseph A. Devito refers to our room as one of our primary territories. And a primary territory, be it your room, house, or car, is your most sacred space. You don't want just anybody coming in a violating it. Now, if you already have someone in that room, your side of the room becomes that primary territory, with your bed being the most important spot, the inner sanctum.